As leading corporations shift to restorative production, water engineers will find themselves at the center of the first wave.

Almost 50 years ago, the humankind first saw our planet in a galactic context and transformed engineers’ perspective on manufacturing. These first “selfies” of the earth showed our entire world as an isolated blue marble with the vast void of space, the single location where humans could survive. Space had been the passion storytellers and philosophers, but the dream of space travel had been realized by leading-edge scientists and engineers.

During the 1960s, a new science of industrial ecology redefined industrial operations for the limited resources of a “spaceship world.” In the Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth (1966), Kenneth Ewart Boulding describes a global transition from a “cowboy economy” that naively exploits resources in a world that is a “virtually illimitable plane.” Humankind had begun to see the earth as “a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or pollution.” With all of our resources already onboard, economic well-being cannot be defined simply by the rate of consumption or production: “Man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form,” Boulding wrote. Later, Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth laid out a new paradigm for designing operations to balance production and well-being with an eye towards future productivity and resources.

Untangling Supply Chains

In 2013, champion solo yachtsman Dame Ellen MacArthur brought the looming waste and raw materials crisis into stark focus at the World Economic Forum. She harked back to images of ships: “At sea, what you have is all you have, stopping en route to restock is not an option, and careful resource management can be a matter of life or death …My boat was my world, I was constantly aware of its supply limits, and when I stepped back ashore, I began to see that our world was not any different. I had become acutely aware of the true meaning of word ‘finite,’ and when I applied it to resources in the global economy, I realized there were some big challenges ahead.” Since then, the MacArthur Foundation has worked with a growing group of partners to organize an initial group of industrial consortia to untangle complex and ever widening supply chains. In 2016, it convened leading companies, city governments philanthropists and policymakers to rethink the future of plastics.

Last week, leaders in the fashion industry announced the Circular Fibres Initiative at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit with industry leaders such as Inditex, H&M, Adidas, Kering, M&S, Bestseller and Nike pledging their support. While manufacturing processes may not be as resource-intensive as mining or electronics manufacturing, the clothing industry can realize critical efficiencies with circular manufacturing and product design. According to McKinsey, clothing production has doubled between 2000 and 2014. Consumers are spending an estimated 60 percent more on clothing and using that clothing for half the time they did 15 years ago. In the US, up to 85 percent of those textiles go to landfill, with precious raw materials lost for the future. The initiative aims to create a vision for a new global textiles system that will replace the linear, “take-make-dispose” model dominating the industry, with a goal of eliminating all textile waste by the year 2037. Initial work by MacArthur, McKinsey, and others has been followed by initiatives from the apparel industry. Signatories of the Call to Action committed to defining a circular strategy, setting targets for 2020 and reporting on their progress.

At the BlueTech Forum in Dublin on June 7, senior operations and sustainability executives from leading corporations will be meeting to discuss how they’re translating circular economy strategies into their work plans. Artemis principal Laura Shenkar will be leading a roundtable discussion with Menno Holterman CEO, of Nijhuis Industries.

Where is the “lowest hanging fruit” for water in circular economy initiatives?

A new study from Stanford breaks new ground in defining the gap in water innovation, and proposes how the US can fire up innovation to face water scarcity, “The Path to Water Innovation.“

Advanced science and engineering are changing the face of telephony and communications, as well as energy and healthcare, but it hasn’t yet reshaped water technology. For example, eyes primary approach to treating sewage worldwide today, the activated sludge process, was invented over 100 years ago. It applies oxygen and bacteria to sewage to reduce the organic components. Despite incremental improvements, activated sludge processing remains largely unchanged in those hundred years, and is an important target for improvement. This process alone uses over 60% of the electricity required for sewage treatment.

The market opportunity for innovation is massive for innovation in activated sludge is massive, with a global municipal market of $2.2 billion, and an industrial market of $1.8 billion.

The Stanford study compares the levels of innovation in renewable energy and water, as measured by patents filed.

Simply raising the price of water services could have a dramatic impact on driving new solutions forward. Studies have found that higher energy prices encourage greater investment by energy users in conservation technologies.

“We see water scarcity in the Western US as an opportunity to consider new and innovative solutions and direct new funding into water innovation,” says the study’s lead author, Dr. Newsha Ajami. “On a separate effort, we are working with policy leaders and utility officials to identify how financing models and policies from renewable energy and energy efficiency in California has led adoption of solar and wind, and might apply some of those models for driving water tech.” Ajami cites new models “virtual water trading on the local level” that mimick solar feedback tariffs and government sponsored funding mechanisms as some examples for the future.

Roger Sorkin is aiming for his new documentary, The Burdento take a place beside The Inconvenient Truth as a harbinger of a new epoch in American popular history. Instead of images of polar bears struggling to stay afloat in a melting Arctic Ocean, The Burden juxtaposes images of US military casualties amidst the smoking ruins of fuel trucks with footage of senior DOD officials speaking about strategic role of renewable energy. At the movie’s center, combat soldiers speak about the personal toll of those supply line attacks. “In a three month span, I buried two guys,” says Iraq war veteran Jon Gensler during the film’s first minutes. “Every time I squeeze the gas pump, I’d think about them.”

The Burden makes a powerful, gut-level connection between renewable energy solutions and the US defense effort. The central theme is simple and clear: oil dependence threatens national security, and renewable energy is a tool for military strategy. Unlike Inconvenient Truth, The Burden does not build a new message for the public, but instead shows us why soldiers and veterans are already driving renewable energy. It shows how former Marine Greg Ballard, Mayor of Indianapolis, is converting his city to zero emissions and how Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn sees the strategic impact of renewable energy. These aren’t environmentalists, and they’re not business people, these are soldiers from the front lines. A dry story of innovation and the next frontier for technology would not have gained the kind of high profile support in Congress and within the military if it hadn’t tapped into this emotional, deeply resonant message.

To my mind, The Burden challenges those of us seeking out drivers for water tech to find another high-powered, gut-level message about the value of water tech innovation. Historically, war has been inextricably connected to energy. Going forward, 21st century warfare will be inextricably linked to water.

Melesse Temescan is one example of the new breed of entrepreneurs emerging with promising water technologies out of the places that have been contending with water scarcity for decades. Temescan’s company, Aybar LLC was among the first awarded the US/Swedish/Dutch Securing Water for Food (SWFF) grant to rapidly build his business for wide scale impact.

Aybar has designed a innovative plow to help Ethiopian farmers reduce water logging during the rainy seasons and conserve water in the dry season. In Ethiopia, water logging, or flooding, prevents cultivation of over 5 million hectares of land during the rainy season. The Aybar BBM allows the livestock used for farming to build deeper, more effective ridges to drain excess water. This plow costs $16.48 as compared with $2000 for Chinese manufactured tractors.

A career researcher for the Government of Ethiopia, Temescan was frustrated to see that his innovation was not getting onto the farms to that needed it. The story of Aybar is a story of entrepreneurship as much as it is a story of innovation. In three years, Temescan has sold 45,000, and has been struggling to manufacture units to keep up with demand. Only an entrepreneur from Ethiopia like Temescan could produce this kind of innovation based on existing practices and build a distribution channel so quickly. With SWFF funding, Temescan expects to sell 60,000 in the next year.

The SWFF program is a pioneering effort focusing upon individual businesses and technologies, rather than large-scale programs. Temescan, and the other 16 SWFF awardees provide a glimpse of how entrepreneurs might drive the velocity of change in the face of water scarcity.

The Ag Innovation Showcase brought together leading crop science companies, investors and promising start-ups earlier this week in St. Louis. I spoke on the “Future of Farming” with Philippe Herve of Bayer CropScience, Brook Porter from Kleiner Perkins, and John Sorenson of Vestaron.

The highlighted leading edge innovations that are bringing big data, microbial pesticides, and advanced sensors to growers in the US.

–Vestaron is one of the rising stars in a new class of biological pest control products. Working with peptides from spider venom, the company has developed pesticides that are innocuous to mammals and break down easily after being applied. It just received USEPA approval and closed a $10 M investment round.

-Big Data: Fresno-based OnFarm integrates field data, weather and imaging data on a cloud-based dashboard for farmers that they can use from their iPhones in the field. It provides field specific analytics, forecasts, and recommendations to plan, manage, and control their field operations. http://www.onfarm.com

A vibrant group of start-ups are developing tools to track critical factors. Adapt-N is a tool uses a well-calibrated computer model, high resolution precipitation and temperature data, and soil, crop and management information to generate nitrogen application recommendations for crops. Hydrobio is developing sophisticated satellite image-driven analytics to manage water and increase crop yields– from scheduling sprinkler watering systems to optimizing sun penetration through the corn plant canopy.

Most important, start-ups and agribusiness leaders were outnumbered by investors. A diverse international crowd of private equity and early-stage investors, from New Zealand, Australia and Israel and throughout the US were a strong indicator that advances in biotech, bio manufacturing and big data are going to reshape farming.